Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to service discovery on electronic devices. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for performing private discovery of electronic devices.
Related Art
Recent improvements in computing power and wireless networking technology have significantly increased the capabilities of electronic devices. For example, laptop computers, tablet computers, portable media players, smartphones, digital media receivers, video game consoles, and/or other modern computing devices are typically equipped with WiFi capabilities that allow the computing devices to retrieve webpages, stream audio and/or video, share desktops and/or user interfaces (UIs), and/or transfer files wirelessly among one another.
Such expansion of computing and networking capabilities has resulted in an increase in the computing and/or networking options available to users of the electronic devices. However, the abundance of options may increase overhead associated with discovery and/or selection of the options. For example, an electronic device may perform service discovery by querying other electronic devices on the same local network for one or more services offered by the other electronic devices. The electronic device may then receive a response from each electronic device that offers at least one of the queried services. As a result, the electronic device may be flooded with a large number of responses, only some of which may be interesting to the electronic device. In addition, processing of each response on the electronic device may consume processor, network, and/or battery resources on the electronic device and negatively impact use of the electronic device.
Hence, use of electronic devices may be facilitated by mechanisms for filtering options and/or reducing overhead associated with performing service discovery on the electronic devices.